Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have been issued a dire warning by a member of the conservative US think-tank that wants to get the duke's immigration records public following their statement against Meta's changes on fact checking.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex released a statement this week accusing Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, of "allowing more abuse and normalising hate speech" after its decision to scrap third-party fact-checking and loosen its content moderation. The Sussexes called on Meta to reconsider the changes, and urged firms to commit to make online spaces safe, saying: "We applaud leaders who refuse to kowtow to bullying".

Now, Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and Bernard and Barbara Lomas Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, accused the Sussex couple of making a "huge mockery" out of the Royal Family" with their "hugely inappropriate political rant", despite not being working members of the Firm.

The Heritage Foundation - a conservative Washington DC think tank - has been trying to force the US government to make Harry's visa application public following the duke's revelations in his memoir Spare, where he wrote about taking recreational drugs in the past. But US judge Carl Nichols ruled in September that the duke's visa application should not be made public, saying that "the public does not have a strong interest in disclosure of the duke’s immigration records".

Mr Gardiner told the Daily Beast: "For members of the Royal Family to engage in such overtly political matters is, quite frankly, highly inappropriate. It goes against royal protocol. Their use of these titles to further their personal and political agendas makes a mockery of the Royal Family’s customary neutrality. Their statement wasn’t a moderate call for dialogue or understanding; it was an outright political rant."

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